Naama Arad’s ‘Har Hazofim’ quotes the view from the window of the fictional Frank Lloyd Wright creation from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic ‘North by Northwest.’ A peach-toned silken curtain intervenes between our gaze and the Xerox copies pasted to the opposite wall on which landscapes can be seen. The paternalistic presidential visages of Mount Rushmore and the modernist architecture both see their material and ideological texture inverted in the most tender of feminist veilings. The title of the work refers to the mountain of the same name, and Israeli enclave in East Jerusalem that houses the Bezalel Academy of Art founded in 1906.
Timothy Archer describes his father’s energy as a foundational impulse of his own creativity. In ‘Shrinking Daddy’s Head’ we see one of his portraits rendered on golden cardboard. The trajectory of shrinking reduction in the image is two-fold: gesturing simultaneously towards the corporeal decay of the subject of the portrait, sick with cancer, and towards the controlled binding of impulse and creative force to a sheet of paper. Both partake in a similar fetishistic recourse to the energy of the father, and to the force of expressive painting.